Ponte in Valtellina

The name looks obvious and perhaps is not. "Ponte" could come from a bridge over the Adda or from a crossing of the Rhon torrent, but the most accepted explanation is another: the place name Vico Ponte appears for the first time in 918 and is said to derive from the Middle High German biunte, a Lombard administrative term for an enclosed and cultivated field. Of bridges, in short, there may never have been any. What there is, in surprising quantity, is churches: twenty-six churches and religious buildings, three of them parish churches, scattered from the valley floor to the high pastures on both sides. At the foot of the bell tower of San Rocco, at the mouth of the Val Fontana, a stone was found bearing a soldier's epigraph carved in the Rhaetic alphabet.

For centuries the village had more uniforms than most. Besides the municipal police there were the carabinieri barracks, that of the Guardia di Finanza — because goods were smuggled from the Val Fontana into Switzerland — and that of the Forestry Corps; today the carabinieri remain, while the Finanza barracks in the upper Val Fontana has become a mountain refuge. For the same reason, its position on the border, a German command was installed here between 1943 and 1945. Of the learned past there remains the Jesuit college, active from the second half of the sixteenth century until the suppression of the order in 1773, and the houses carry the us'céra, the system by which here and at Chiuro people defended themselves for centuries against floods.